Microsoft backs off from ‘warning’ about Chrome and Firefox

Microsoft started testing a warning for Windows 10 users last week that displayed a prompt when Chrome or Firefox was about to be installed. The software giant is now reversing this controversial test in its latest Windows 10 preview, released last Friday. The Verge understands Microsoft no longer plans to include this warning in the upcoming Windows 10 October 2018 Update that will ship next month, but that the company may continue to test these types of prompts in future updates.

Most likely is that they knew people would react badly and wanted to know how badly, so they added the “feature” to find out the size and magnitude of complaints (fully planning to do a “LOL, we decided not to do that in the final release” before they even started).

As a web developer, this sort of behaviour makes me want to actively seek out ways to exploit Edge’s sluggishness to support new web platform features to build Edge-incompatible websites where I would normally otherwise write stuff which degrades gracefully.

(If you putter around on sites like caniuse.com, you’ll notice that, often, The New Hot Thingâ„¢ features will be supported by everything except IE, Edge, and Opera Mini… and Opera Mini isn’t a full browser.)